Re: Simple Program Won't Run

[bill-auger]

for all intents and purposes, entering a line feed int the REPL
is equivalent to "print it"

FWIW, GNU smalltalk's somewhat radical divergences from ST80,
are actually the natural evolution of the system, given that the
smalltalk machines, which were originally conceived,, do not
actually exist - the course of history demoted smalltalk to an
application, running on a VM, running on foreign hardware, and
mostly isolated from the real machine or its real operating
system - only recently, have other smalltalks such as pharo, put
any emphasis on interoperability with heterogeneous
(non-smalltalk) systems, outside its closed world - they are now
working on a "headless" pharo, which can be configured
(or "booted") via init scripts and controlled via an API from
another system - in that respect, gnu-smalltalk was far "ahead
of the curve" (a characteristic, very much in the smalltalk
tradition)

so, the blue book specifications must be viewed WRT the
historical context - at that time, the GUI was something of a
novelty, which set smalltalk apart from all other general-purpose
systems - the smalltalk visionaries were not only designing a
programming language, or an IDE application; they were inventing
the entire concept of "the GUI" - today GUIs are ubiquitous - if
that book were written today, they probably would have omitted
all of the GUI-specific operations, deferring that concern
(presentation/HCI), arbitrarily to the whims of implementors

for example, no one today would specify that some operation
_must_ be done, using "middle-mouse-button" or "CTRL-p" - it is
easy to imagine, that if the original smalltalk designers had
any inkling, that it would actually be but one among many
development tools, running on top of a UNIX system, they
probably would have specified a command-line interface, and
interoperability with system libs, to extend the capabilities of
the otherwise reclusive GUI world